Mail for Good: how the community of programmers helps NGOs

Our non-profit organization needed a cheaper tool for email newsletters. Therefore, we (the American community freeCodeCamp.org ) have developed it.

Every week I send newsletters to millions of people who subscribe to freeCodeCamp.org.
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The mailing list is strictly addressable and carried out through Amazon Web Services, which costs us $ 0.0001 per letter.

Those. I can send 1 million emails, bypassing most spam filters, for as little as $ 100.

Since last year, I use a new tool for mailing. At my disposal - a convenient web interface with a bunch of advanced features for mass mailings:

• HTML templates;
• analytical panels;
• tracking the opening of letters (tracking pixels);
• link tracking;
• embedded widgets for subscriptions;
• opt-out function;
• list of imported / exported data;
• role access control.

This tool is our internal development.
It is absolutely free.
With fully open source.
It is called - Mail for Good .

And today we present it to the public. This is a beta version. Non-profit organizations from around the world can immediately start using it.

Mail for Good is a very inexpensive marketing tool for non-profit organizations.

So, if you are already burning up with impatience to start using it, here is a link to GitHub . Go ahead, make the world a better place.

But if you are still considering whether Mail for Good is suitable for your organization, let me tell you more.

Mail for Good - the cheapest way to address mailing.

This is a free open source. You just need a server. We use the cloud, for $ 10 a month. You can too. Or use your own server.

And so, you pay Amazon dollar for every 10,000 emails sent through their Simple Email Service.

If you have a million mailing addresses, and you do a newsletter once a month, then it costs you $ 100 a month.

If once a week - 400 dollars.
Three times a week - 1 200 dollars.

For comparison: hosting a mailing list with a million email addresses on MailChimp, no matter how many times you send it, costs $ 4,399 per month.



Other mail services are not much cheaper. And most of them will tell you their prices only after a phone call.

With Mail for Good, your mailing list stays on your server

You do not need to worry about the fact that a third-party mail service will be hacked and the addresses of your subscribers will be stolen. You control all of your organization’s data.

If you want your worker or even a volunteer to develop a template for mailing or to look at analytics, you can give them this opportunity without having access to your data.

You can also easily import and export data. You can also create as many mailing lists as you like.

Mail for Good is constantly expanding its functionality.

Since Mail for Good is an open source ( BSD-3 license ), each organization using our service can contribute and make its own improvements.

freeCodeCamp actively improves and maintains Mail for Good, so the service will grow steadily over time.

Future releases will include features such as A / B testing and integration with other popular tools used by non-profit organizations.

All this work is done openly, on GitHub. You can easily send a request about the functional features your organization needs or report bugs using the GitHub issue .

Frequently asked Questions

Whether only non-profit organizations can use Mail for Good

Anyone can use Mail for Good. We are a non-profit organization and have developed this tool, taking into account the needs of societies like us. But individual entrepreneurs, companies and even government organizations can use it and save a lot on it.

How do I set up Mail for Good

Unless you have your own servers, we recommend setting up a cloud server on Amazon Web Services. Amazon is cheap, secure, and popular with many organizations, including, for example, Netflix.

Here are detailed instructions on how to set up Mail for Good on Amazon .

Who created Mail for Good

The creation of Mail for Good has already taken thousands of hours of programmers. On the support and development will take as much again. Until now, all this has been done on a voluntary basis, already for a year. For example, these people have invested a lot in the project:

• Andrew Walsh
• Ian hawes
• Valentin dupas
• Carl kashnier
• Michael D. Johnson
• Joel bentley

How can I help the project

The quickest way to help is to start using it. We do not collect any user data, so we will know about it only if you send us your feedback. You can also report bugs.

If you want to help with writing code, then join the Mail for Good Gitter chatroom and introduce yourself .

Mail for Good is just one of many tools developed by the freeCodeCamp community to help non-profit organizations. If you want to support our noble aspirations, you can connect monthly donations , in the amount that you can afford.

Thanks for attention. Happy mailing.

PS

I asked my friends from NPOs to comment on their experience with mailing lists.

Our experience with mailings is rather successful, we have a base of only 10,000 subscribers, we use MailChimp, we send it out once a week and more often. But plans to grow and develop. So we like the idea of ​​Mail for Good.

- Elena Podoprigora, Impact Hub Odessa

We have the following practice - we also realized that it is very expensive to sit on MailChimp. But, in general, we have always revolved around the WordPress ecosystem and last year we chose a bunch of MailPoet as a subscriber management system, statistics and compilation of letters and MailGun for delivering letters.

Open Source Mailer - this is fine, like any Open Source, but there is one thing. He, as I see it, on Node.js, which can cause some difficulties for people who have never worked with the terminal. Therefore, you need to be well aware of your competencies when deciding to install this particular software. On the other hand, to those people who, on the contrary, love JavaScript, this may just please more.

- Alexey Sidorenko, Director of Greenhouse Social Technologies

Yes, in the work faced with the choice of service e-mail newsletters. One of the main limitations when choosing a solution was the lack of a service distributor on the Russian market and the lack of a server license with the ability to install locally on their servers. Solutions of the Russian development unfortunately either strongly lose to the western solutions in terms of usability, or work in “gray” having only a sublicenseer in Russia, and the main UL is registered in offshores. If there is a free source solution for NPOs with the ability to install locally, this will greatly facilitate our work.

- Alexander Smirnov, Legacy Endowment Foundation

Very cool! As a social startup, we’ll be setting up email marketing from scratch and now I’ll carefully study this distribution option.

- Ruslan Shekurov, CEO & Founder at Donorsearch.org

For the PRO Women's community, a mailing list is an important tool for bringing together over 600 women in 16 cities. We collect member stories, share news and educational materials in our newsletters. About a year we sent a mailing with Mailchimp. While not exceeded the number of subscribers available for the free version - 2000 people. Now switched to Unisender. Its paid version is cheaper. In general, services are similar, but Mailchimp has a more user-friendly interface and more analytics. If Mail for Good combines the advantages of both services, it may be the best solution for us.

- Taya Konstantinova, PRO Women